Why the N.F.L.’s Ricky Williams Suggests Cannabis for Constipation

The former Dolphins running back is getting a Ph.D. in Chinese medicine.

Ricky Williams, the Miami Dolphins running back, retired from the N.F.L. in 2012. “I wanted to go on a spiritual quest,” he said the other day, “to find out who I was and what I’m really here to do.” So far, he has become a certified yogi, learned how to perform craniosacral therapy, and studied evolutionary astrology. For three hundred dollars he will interpret the orientation of the stars at your birth. Last month, he launched Real Wellness by Ricky Williams, a cannabis-based line of tonics, salves, and vape cartridges—an offshoot of his long and sometimes complicated relationship with herbs. (Repeated violations of the N.F.L.’s drug policy had something to do with Williams’s early retirement, although he was also bored and battered by football.)

A toothache recently led Williams to pop a few Advil, but he generally tries to avoid Western medicine. He keeps a closet full of healing herbs at his house, in Venice, California, and he is in the first year of a doctoral program at Emperor’s College of Traditional Oriental Medicine, in Santa Monica. Shorn of his trademark dreadlocks, and using a different name, he has managed to remain largely anonymous.

“Almost no one knows who I am. It’s great,” Williams, who is forty, said the other day, on campus. “But I could probably wear a Dolphins jersey and still be unknown here.”

On his application, in the space provided for “personal accomplishments,” he’d written, “Won a Heisman Trophy in 1998.” (In parentheses, he explained that it was an award given to the best collegiate football player in the country.) But at a student-orientation session, when he and his two hundred classmates were asked to say something “special” about themselves, Williams mentioned only that he has a twin.

One morning in the school’s herb lab, blue rubber gloves and a lab coat concealed Williams’s huge tattooed arms. Jacques MoraMarco, the academic dean, walked in as Williams took stock of the lab’s supply of sheng jiang—fresh ginger. MoraMarco noted that he had the Tibetan version of one of Williams’s Sanskrit tattoos (“Om”). He added, “As a practitioner, Ricky will bring Chinese medicine to the forefront, like Michael Phelps did when he used the Chinese cupping technique at the Rio Olympics. Or Elvis Presley, with karate.”

After the dean left, Karolyn Park, the lab’s instructor, offered to show a visitor some herbs. “Can we meditate first?” Williams asked.

“Oh, yes,” Park replied, and turned off the light. “Count to one hundred, then backward,” she said. “If you lose count, start over.” In an adjacent room, a paper shredder shrieked. The instructor and the student sat on stools, still and silent, for eleven minutes. Then they stood and started an inventory of the more than three hundred herbs on hand.

“We have pretty much all the herbs in the Chinese-medicine pharmacopoeia here in powder form,” Williams said. He pointed at a bin. “This one stops bleeding. They go to different meridians or channels.” He went on, “We learn the pinyin—which means the transliteration from the Chinese character.” He gestured to a powder that he was using in a remedy for a patient who’d come to the school’s clinic complaining of a stuffy nose. “The magnolia flower is xin yi hua,” Williams said. “It opens the nasal orifices.”

“There are things Chinese medicine calls herbs that aren’t plants,” he said. “These are radish seeds. This is chicken gizzard. Or there’s gecko.” He turned to Park. “Do we have turtle shell?”

Next, Williams came to cannabis seed. “We use this for constipation,” he said. “In the ancient pharmacopoeia text, they mention cannabis flower, too. But then it became illegal and disappeared.” He shook his head.